The reluctant princes

The future of the royal family sits squarely on the shoulders of William and Harry, but they both loathe the limelight. Does the palace have a serious problem on its hands? Patrick Barkham goes behind the scenes to find out

They hate the limelight. Does this pose a problem for the palace? Photograph: Dan Kitwood Dan Kitwood/Getty

The air in Berkeley Square smelled of sweet, expensive cigars. Around the corner from the Rolls-Royce showroom, a well-heeled art gallery was full of well-heeled white people, flushed pink with the thrill of proximity to royalty. Prince William was flushed too, in a way that recalled his mother, and his adam's apple bobbed as one of Diana's old friends, Julia Samuel, spoke of the Princess of Wales's "outrageous laugh". Then, hovering at the bottom of the small gallery's staircase, the 26-year-old prince marked his decision to become the patron of the Child Bereavement Charity, which his mother helped launch, with a short and unexpected speech.

For the first time, the heir to the throne talked publicly about his loss, and the "emptiness" he felt on Mother's Day. If his words sounded posh - "Never being able to say the word 'Mummy' again in your life sounds like a small thing. However for many, including me, it's now really just a word: hollow and evoking only memories" - they were also moving and unusually personal.

This two-minute address to a room of barely 50 people, and only three journalists, may come to be seen as a defining moment in the adult life of Prince William. In part it heralded the start of a new charm offensive, a flurry of visits that were the defensive prod of royal spin doctors against a documentary accusing William of being lazy compared with his father, Charles. But William's personal revelations also represented a direct engagement with the legacy of his mother: the first reluctant steps of a young prince who must be found a meaningful public role and hopes, perhaps, to base it on his mother's charitable work.

The House of Windsor's two greatest assets - William and his brother, Harry - stand at a peculiarly vulnerable point in their lives. They are also in an historically unique position. The old deference in British society is weakening as citizens demand value for money and transparency from politicians and monarchy alike; never before has there been a Prince of Wales as old as Charles, the longest-serving heir; and never before have two young princes had to accommodate such a rampantly pervasive mass media which they, more than any other young royals, have good cause to loathe.

So what role should the young princes take? Can they modernise the monarchy? And what is best for them personally, as young men? How they, and their staff, answer these questions will go a long way to determining the future of our royal family ...

As you turn into Cleveland Row in central London, the traffic melts away. Across the road from Buckingham Palace, Clarence House and the adjoining St James's Palace is the home and headquarters of the Prince of Wales, his second wife, Camilla, and his two sons. Buckingham Palace and Clarence House have long had distinct staff and operations, but this year another mini-empire was created: William and Harry were given their own staff and offices in St James's Palace.

Inside, all you can hear is the soft ticking of an antique clock. The princes now have their own private secretary, a former SAS soldier called Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, and their own youthful press officer, Miguel Head from the Ministry of Defence. They are given diplomatic counsel by Sir David Manning, the former British ambassador in Washington and Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser in the run up to the Iraq war. The operation is all paid for by the man they call "Pop", thanks to his income from the Duchy of Cornwall's lands and organic jams (£16.3m in the last financial year).

Yet many of this year's stories about the princes have been unwelcome: the video where Harry calls a fellow soldier "our little Paki friend", his split from Chelsy Davey, even his wearing of pink nail-varnish after another night on the town. And after last year's disastrous jape flying a Chinook to his cousin's stag do on the Isle of Wight, William has also seen more bad headlines, notably from a Dispatches documentary which compared his workload with Prince Charles's. It stated that, in 2007, William undertook 14 royal engagements whereas his father, aged 26, performed 84, despite a full-time career in the navy - and Diana, at that age, fulfilled 200 official engagements. And then there is all the speculation about how long William will keep Kate Middleton - dubbed "waity Katey" by tabloids - hanging on for an engagement and that most eagerly anticipated spectacle, a royal wedding.

Supported by their dad's private (and taxed) income, the young princes do not actually cost British taxpayers much. We pay for their security costs via the Home Office, but Clarence House stresses the level of security provided is a government decision. William's minders are discreet and far fewer in number than most celebrities employ, although his image minders are hard at work countering charges that William is workshy.

Staff say the official statistics don't tell the full story, that William is tied up with his gruelling RAF helicopter training and that he "goes privately to all sorts of places because he knows he's going to be able to connect with people". He makes private visits to Centrepoint and another of his mother's favourite causes, the Royal Marsden Hospital, and is patron or president of 12 organisations. Anyway, Clarence House argues, comparisons with Prince Charles at a similar age are not valid because Charles had been heir to the throne since he was three; William does not yet have such a senior role.

His royal spin doctors still seem worried, though. At one point during the period I spent following him, William was yanked out of a meeting and I was introduced to him - just after being told I must not ask him any questions. We had a short conversation which, in the arcane, protocol-obsessed world of royal reporting, was deemed completely off the record. If Clarence House hoped this would make me warm to William, they were right. He was likeable and professional, betraying only a flicker of unease about meeting this random journalist.

While the Prince of Wales was samba dancing around South America last month, his elder son was undertaking a far more spartan set of engagements in London. As commentators have cruelly noted, physically William suddenly looks much more like his father. "A bad heir day," was the Sun's headline when William visited a passing-out parade for police officers in north London. His thinning pate gave him the look of that other prince still in search of a meaningful role: his uncle, Prince Edward.

William's clasped hands and slightly stooped earnestness are indeed reminiscent of his father. His gaze, however, is his mother's; a winning blend of sincerity and flirtatious playfulness. The similarities are all too evident for Julia Samuel of the Child Bereavement Charity, who was good friends with Diana and remembers William as a boy. "He has that magic ability to make people feel better about themselves," she says. "It's impossible to say it without sounding trite, but I think he's exceptional, I really do."

After his speech about Mother's Day, William hosted a dinner in St James's Palace's state apartments for the 40th anniversary of Centrepoint, acknowledging the incongruity of holding a lavish "celebration" for a charity that helps the young and homeless. The following day, he visited the decidedly unfashionable St Giles Trust, a charity working out of a scruffy terrace in south London that helps ex-offenders and the disadvantaged find housing and employment. During the Centrepoint dinner and at the St Giles Trust, William spoke easily to dozens of young people who had nothing in common with him. Their reaction was uniform: William, they kept saying, was so down to earth.

He may be a privileged young prince but William is recognisably modern. During his Centrepoint dinner, he revealed he watched The Bill, listened to Radio 1 and knew his urban pop culture. ("He said I looked like an R&B star," said one Centrepoint resident, Ramone Edwards, 20, wearing two glitzy studs in his ear. "A soft-spoken Snoop Dogg.") William sat on desks and joked about the absurdity of these meet-and-greet sessions. On several occasions, he apologised for the presence of the press: "Sorry about everyone in the way; we've brought them off the streets," he said of the small media presence during the St Giles visit.

One aide attributes William's winning informality to the fact his ascension to the throne is still some way off. "He and Harry are very comfortable carrying on the Windsor traditions, but they also know how to be 'normal' - no offence to the other members of the royal family - because they have been accorded this level of privacy and normality that hasn't been open to their predecessors."

William spent almost half-an-hour in private talking to Junior Smart, 33, a team leader at the St Giles Trust, who rebuilt his life after being jailed for serious drug offences. "He was open-minded and flung ideas back," Smart told me afterwards. "I've been to meetings with politicians and they all ask me the same question - what do we need to do to turn these young people away from gangs and guns and knife crime? I say, come down to the grass-roots level and see that it's not true, not everyone who comes out of prison is useless - but William's the first one to have done it. He was talking to my clients and he gave them a lot of time, and I've got to give him respect for that."

Views of how close William and Harry are to their father differ. Some point out that Charles's workload meant he was an "absent father" during their youth - but most agree the three princes have a close bond these days.

"There was that famous suggestion by Lord Spencer, to rounds of applause at their mother's funeral, that Charles should not be the only mentor of the boys," recalls Robert Lacey, the royal historian. "But that has not proved the case. The boys have stuck very closely to their father as mentor. They are following the trail he blazed, without anybody quite realising it."

But do the princes have ideas of their own? Everyone agrees that Harry is "not a thinker", although staff in his office claim he has a gift for getting straight to the point. But what are William's big ideas? His conversations at the St Giles Trust revealed some liberal thoughts: "A lot of employers don't understand the lessons ex-offenders have learned just from being in prison or at rock-bottom," he told one group of former prisoners. "But I think it shows remarkable strength of character [for you] to be here in St Giles. That in itself is a quality that should be put forward to the employers."

William "is a typical firstborn: he's more cautious and dutiful", says Judy Wade, author of Diana: The Intimate Portrait and a royal reporter for more than 30 years. "But they are determined to carry on Diana's work." William's commitment to Centrepoint, which Diana helped put on the map, demonstrates that.

Privately, he has expressed concerns about the collapse in moral values and breakdown of the family. So far, however, William has no specific plans to set up his own career-defining charity and, as he and his office emphasise, his helicopter training commitments currently impede his charitable work (this year he began training to become a search-and-rescue pilot for the RAF, and is committed to this career path for at least five years). When his military commitments finish, his new office will be ready with a full-time programme of official royal engagements.

According to one royal watcher, while Charles is known privately for his indecision, his sons are more decisive. "Stubborn" is used on several occasions to describe William, and staff stress they have no say about when, or if, he will get engaged to Middleton - and nor, for that matter, when Harry will settle down.

"They are young men in their 20s and I have absolutely no idea what is on their minds in terms of relationships and what happens in the future," says one senior royal source. A well-connected French magazine recently reported the imminent announcement of William and Kate's summer wedding, but palace officials stonily deny all such speculation, and commentators judge there is no space in the royal calendar for summer nuptials this year.

If William is considered to be buttoned-up and cautious, then Harry is more wayward. "There is quite a normal pattern of an heir and a spare," says Lacey, "where one of them usually goes rather radically off the rails. But while we try and play up that stereotype with Harry, on the whole both young men have been remarkably serious in their application to their duty."

Part of the perceived difference between the two may come about because William enjoys far greater protection from the media than Harry.

William's misjudgments are more likely to be well managed than those involving his brother. Nevertheless, royal aides noticeably brighten when they talk about Harry. Staff say he has grown up since serving in Afghanistan, but that he is still known for his sense of humour.

"Diana said, 'He's definitely a Spencer, he's a real joker.' She loved filthy jokes, the filthier the better," says Wade. "The fact that Charles is a bit of a thinker may have made his life more difficult. Harry is not a thinker but he's got such warmth and charisma, everyone likes him. He's got the Diana magic - he's one of us."

Harry, who is learning to fly helicopters with the Army Air Corps, possesses the kind of popular appeal that makes everyone want to have a pint with him. And, it seems, he is happy to have a pint with them too: on a trip to Lesotho, he enjoyed several evening beers with the royal press pack. (Royal reporters believe Harry will get back together with Chelsy. Both princes met their girlfriends during their youth when they were protected from press exposure; today it is even harder for them to conduct a romance, or trust those they meet not to sell their stories.)

While William wanted to be a police officer as a boy, Harry hoped to be a soldier. The younger prince got his wish. "Harry is a natural soldier and he's a really good communicator," says a senior royal aide, and former soldier. The aide speaks of Harry having the ability to jump in with the right word and "hit the nail on the head" at meetings of the princes' charities. "His brother is naturally juxtapositioned with that. But both of them are gloriously relaxed in their own skin. Both have got a great emphatic thing from Pa and from mother."

"Harry clowns," says Harper Brown, country director of Sentebale, the charity Harry co-founded to help orphans in Lesotho. "He'll pick up a kid and just clown around, and it is spontaneous, not a chore." Like William's charitable work, Harry's apparent desire to help children with HIV/Aids is a clear engagement with the work of his mother. He is "completely besotted" with Sentebale, says a senior royal aide.

Just before I spoke to Brown, he attended the charity's board meeting with Harry. It may not have been an easy discussion. Sentebale was reported to have spent only £84,000 on local projects such as children's homes in its first 18 months of operation, despite raising £1.15m. Over the same period, £472,000 went on staff salaries, setting up offices, a website and vehicles. Last month, the Telegraph revealed Sentebale had run into financial difficulties and Lord Ashcroft had bailed it out with a large donation.

"It was our own fault," Brown says of the negative coverage. "On the surface, it looked terrible." He explains that the figures reflect an 18-month accounting period during which the charity was only operational in Lesotho for four months. By September, he says Sentebale will have spent £711,000 looking after nearly 2,500 children. "They are using the fact that we've got Harry as our patron against us," says Brown.

What did Harry think of the controversy? "In the board meeting, he told us that one of his policemen had said he'd read the story and believed it. So Harry sat him down and said, 'This is the story.' I didn't have to tell him. He knew. He knows what we're doing."

Lesotho, says Brown, is genuinely "in Harry's heart", but he does not expect much hands-on support in the next five years: "He's stuck in the military system at the moment but he's made a promise to come out here when he can."

The princes' virtual exile from charity work because of their armed forces commitments may prove a serious strategic error for the House of Windsor. Despite the current run of good publicity for Charles, the royal family needs his sons while they are young and popular.

British people may have no great desire for a republic, but their monarch's role as head of state in Commonwealth countries such as Australia - where Camilla, in particular, is widely unpopular - will be tenuous at best when the Queen's reign comes to a close. If the young princes are anything less than popular and respected, it will hasten the demise of the royal family's reach around the world.

Some experienced observers believe the monarchy's failure to capitalise on the young princes' popularity is down to a fear of upsetting Charles. "We're getting a repeat of the 1990s when Diana outshone Charles," says one. "Now his sons are outshining him."

It is more plausible, though, that the decision to semi-exile themselves with their helicoptering is the princes' own: perhaps they are simply attracted to the armed forces for the relative privacy it bestows upon their working lives. "Whether consciously or not, I'm sure there is an element of self-protection in their choice of career in the armed forces," says Lacey. "It doesn't just keep them out of public scrutiny, it is an answer to public scrutiny."

Are they reluctant to work with a media they despise but on whom their family's future depends? "The bit of the media they have a problem with is summed up in one word - paparazzi," says one Clarence House aide. "They are relatively thick-skinned about the daily grind of royal correspondents and stories. You'd have to be, when you are born with it."

"They've always hated the media, just like Charles hates the media - with a few exceptions," says one royal reporter. "It's the whole royal family, it's the ethos. When you live in that world, you love everybody in the armed forces - there are no pacifists in the royal family - and loathe the media. You're conditioned to it."

"I have no doubt at all that they loathe the media from the bottom of their souls," Lacey confirms. "But they are remarkably good at hiding it, and that is an indication of their professionalism. Whatever their feelings, it doesn't stop them appearing in public and addressing difficult issues like William did with his mother." Lacey believes it is a media conceit that the princes must get on well with the press, not a requirement of the job at all. Leading politicians don't exactly love the media, he points out.

Those who work with the young princes say they are uniquely close, and not just when they are photographed together bonding over £100 Treasure Chest cocktails at Mahiki. Some, however, fear their relationship may come under strain. Harry, predicts Wade, is likely to be gradually marginalised while William is groomed for power, with all the responsibility - and image protection - that brings. When William was being taught to fly a kite on a Norfolk beach as a youngster, a royal police officer took pity on Harry and offered to build him a sandcastle. "It's the only bleedin' castle you're ever likely to get," the officer apparently said.

"William is nice but I can't help hearing him ask, 'Do I have to do it?'" Wade says. "You're a prisoner, not just of the palace but the Foreign Office - telling you where you can and can't go. You walk round all day talking to awestruck people who can't string two sentences together. It's a terrible life. That's why William and Harry don't want to do it. They want to put it off for as long as possible."